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Luxor Survivors Say Killers Fired Methodically

When Linka Fingerhuth, 32, a Swiss tourist, heard the pop-popping of automatic rifle fire at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt, last Monday, she thought that someone was shooting at a troublesome dog she could see scuttling away in the distance. But she soon discovered that she was a likely target herself.

Crouched behind one of the soaring columns that distinguish the 3,400-year-old temple -- a ''must'' destination for foreign visitors to Egypt -- Ms. Fingerhuth, a magazine journalist from Zurich, peered down toward the temple entrance.

''People were running away, left and right,'' she said in an interview at her home. Two tourists standing atop a ramp leading to the temple's middle courtyard suddenly keeled over awkwardly, as if to pick something up from the ground, she said.

Then she understood why: sprinting toward her hiding place were two men carrying assault rifles. As they ran past a Japanese tourist, she said, one of the men fired into the woman's face from a range of about 15 inches.

The close-range salvos and the chaos were the start of a half-hour of relentless and systematic terror. In the next 30 to 35 minutes, 58 foreigners -- 35 of them Swiss -- and 4 Egyptians, along with 6 gunmen, would perish in the worst terrorist attack ever in Egypt -- an assault for which the militant Islamic Group quickly took responsibility.

A welter of rumors and unanswered questions followed the mayhem. Did the attackers, as some witnesses suggested, sexually moleste young women? Did they dance on mutilated dead bodies? Was there any immediate response from the Egyptian security forces?

From interviews with survivors and Egyptian investigators, from the published statements of other survivors and from the reports of forensic specialists in Switzerland, some answers are emerging.

The attack appears to have been as methodical as it was gruesome. The six gunmen operated in pairs, Egyptian investigators say, with the two men who killed the police guards then taking their place near the temple entrance to ward off an expected counterattack that never came.

The other four attackers carried out most of the killing, investigators say, splitting off right and left as they rushed into the middle courtyard and toward the crowds of tourists like Ms. Fingerhuth among the columns at the rear.

In all, the gunmen carried six automatic rifles, three butcher knives, two pistols and a police walkie-talkie taken from one of the slain guards. Beneath their coats they had stashed clipload after clipload of ammunition: their supply was still not exhausted when the last five of them were finally killed by the police three hours later, near the Valley of the Queens.

Most of the victims were shot in the head and chest, suggesting an attack that proceeded with discipline and precision, Egyptian investigators said. Some were slashed and hacked with knives, so viciously in one case that a victim's head was nearly severed, witnesses and Egyptian investigators said.

Aim Said to Be Death, Not Mutilation

Egyptian and Swiss forensic experts said many of the victims had been utterly disfigured by gunshot and stab wounds. Egyptian officials say they have found no evidence that victims were intentionally mutilated, although the officials and witnesses confirmed that some of the victims had been ''finished off with knives'' after first being wounded with gunshots.

Several witnesses, including Abdelnasser Ahmed Ibrahim, 27, an unarmed guard employed by the Government to watch over the temple's ancient treasures, said some knife wounds had been particularly horrific: one woman's stomach had been so badly slashed that it gaped open, he said.

But Egyptian investigators said there was no evidence to corroborate a report in a Swiss newspaper that a German woman saw her father beheaded. They said the grievous facial wounds attributed by some witnesses to deliberate mutilation seemed to have been caused by automatic rifles fired from very close range.

One wounded Swiss witness, Rosemarie Dousse, 66, has that said young women were separated from the groups of tourists and led away to be sexually abused. But Egyptian officials said they had found no evidence of such abuse, and Ms. Fingerhuth and Egyptian and foreign witnesses reported seeing no sign that any tourists had been singled out in this way.

Egyptian investigators have been able to identify only one of the assailants, even though photographs of the bodies of five of the six men have been published in Egyptian newspapers.

The sole gunman identified, Methat Ahmed Abdelrahman, had been sought by the police as a suspected terrorist, but there was no evidence that he had taken part in previous attacks.

A note found in one gunman's pocket suggested that the attackers were aligned with Mostapha Hamza, a leader of the Islamic Group who is believed to be in Afghanistan, but how and where the assault was planned remains a mystery.

Gunmen Were Able To Kill at Will

What is now beyond doubt is that from the moment the attack began, the assailants were able to kill at will.

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''I kept waiting to hear someone firing back, but there was nothing,'' said Ms. Fingerhuth, a widow who had left her two young children -- Anna, 5, and Balz, 3 -- with relatives in Zurich while she went on vacation.

When it began, Ms. Fingerhuth said, she and a group of about a dozen tourists were inspecting a wall-relief in a small side chapel several hundred yards above and beyond the entrance.

''I saw a dog running, and I said, 'They are shooting at the dog,' '' Ms. Fingerhuth recalled.

Then came the realization that the temple was under attack, and Ms. Fingerhuth thought that one of the attackers had caught sight of her.

She and three others -- her friend Trix Nigg, 33, Felix E. Muller and his wife, who was not identified by name, clambered over a wall and took cover in a small ruined enclosure.

As they cowered low, they would later learn, other tourists less than 20 feet away were trapped among the sandstone pillars of ancient colonnades, from which there was no escape.

''Now the shooting is very close,'' Mr. Muller, a journalist, wrote on Tuesday in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung newspaper. ''There are hysterical screams, rending cries, Arabic commands -- all sending multiple echoes from the rock walls around us.''

But at the end, Ms. Fingerhuth said, ''there were only the screams of the victims, and the attackers shouting, ''Allah u Akbar!'' -- ''God is most great!'' -- both a religious utterance and the rallying cry of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world.

No Sign of Police For a Long Time

It is clear that the six men who carried out the attack met with no armed resistance until long after they fled in a taxi and then a hijacked bus, some 45 minutes after the massacre began.

By killing two police guards posted 400 yards apart at the outset of the assault, the gunmen eliminated the only armed security at the site, Egyptian investigators say. Reinforcements did not arrive until after the attackers left.

''We cannot let the police off the hook,'' said a senior Egyptian investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''We understand that it was a terrorist attack, but if the police had responded more quickly, many lives would have been saved.''

Only 20 or 30 minutes after the attack ended and Ms. Fingerhuth left her hiding place did she and other survivors encounter police reinforcements approaching the temple in a jeep as a tour bus was carrying the survivors, including four wounded tourists, back to Luxor.

Indeed, she said, Egyptian civilians and tour guides were the first to rescue survivors and try to tend wounded and dead. From the accounts of Ms. Fingerhuth and Mr. Muller, it seems that the terrorists crisscrossed the temple's middle court, moving away then returning to gun down people who had taken cover and who screamed in terror when they were discovered.

Fear Has Not Left The Survivors

Although the attack began about 8:45 A.M., it was not until noon that the police finally cornered the last five of the gunmen after chasing them for more than two hours through the stark desert hills.

During that chase, the sixth gunman, who collapsed after being wounded, was killed by his companions, apparently to prevent his capture, Egyptian investigators said. As the two sides exchanged fire throughout the pursuit, tourists across the area were ordered to take cover in ancient tombs.

''After a period of calm, we came up thinking it was safe, but the firing started again,'' Karen Dean, an Egyptology student from Warwick University in England who was among those pinned down in the latter stage of the morning melee told reporters on her return home. ''This time the police started firing back. There was fear in their eyes, and they were firing large rifles.''

The fear has not yet left survivors like Ms. Fingerhuth. After her return home on Tuesday, she said, she thought she was dreaming that a terrorist wanted to kill her, then that another tourist wanted to share her hiding place and she was saying there was no room.

Then, she said, she awoke to find that ''it was my daughter asking to get into bed with me.''

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A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 1997, on Page A00012 of the National edition with the headline: Luxor Survivors Say Killers Fired Methodically. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe